The 5 Dragon Gems

Level design in this level is deceptive. First thing you'll notice is the difficulty curve: the first level is incredibly easy and full of powerups. Most of the levels are moderate but both the second level and the castle level are pretty argh. Some levels feel underdeveloped and thrown together, while some areas are passable as a decent experience, and others could've been good but had a problem that ruined everything. Unfortunately, you get more of the former and the latter.

This is a hack with some neat and sometimes unusual aesthetic choices. The palette in the Boo level is pretty awesome and the lava level's background is quite weird with a drastic hue shift but somehow works. Unfortunately, some levels didn't turn out so good: Strange Path looks like a clusterfuck, and some levels have garbled tiles.

Mushroom Plain is the most frustrating level of the demo due to sprite tile memory problems in the second room: many enemies don't appear but can and will kill you several times. I wanted to quit this hack because of the bugs in this level alone. Sometimes, in the lava level, one of the essential rafts will not spawn. Finally, if you don't manage to kill the Pokeys in that level, you will get stuck in the room and die from the timer.

One dumb thing that I can't get over is how the secret exits or the means of getting to them are hidden on the bottom tile of the level, which is invisible to the player in the only emulator the hack seems to work on, so you don't know where is safe to walk on with the item. Furthermore, said items are usually hidden out of view and take guesswork to find!

[[Side note: TheRobju's more recent work looks an awful lot more appealing but I'm not sure what the future of that is seeing how his account is partially disabled at this time.]]

AddMusic kills the hack in accurate emulators and a badge will be awarded for fixing this as well as the graphical and sprite tile memory errors.